At a recent program, poet Ben Heins had participants trolling sample poetry for techniques that could help us as prose writers. One of the many questions he suggested we ask ourselves about our prose is whether our description is “vivid, sensual, and alarming.” That last word—“alarming”— really stuck with many participants. Alarming images are not easy to forget, and indeed, his use of the word in his talk makes it a craft tip I am not likely to forget. As an example he used the poem by Andrew Hudgins, “ Grandmother’s Spit ”—is that a title you’re likely to forget? In scanning for an alarming image to share here from prose literature, I thought of Margot Livesey ’s Banishing Verona (the first line of which I used in a former post ). It’s about the interaction between a handyman with Asperger’s, who is renovating a home in the owner’s absence, and the very pregnant woman who arrives on the doorstep claiming to be the owner’s niece. In her opening lines Livesey uses the startlin...